The Nationals leader and Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, says Premier Jacinta Allan has scrapped Regional Roads Victoria, revealing for every Victorian voter her utter contempt and disregard for the problems facing regional and rural Victorians.
And he says it gets worse, with the Allan Labor Government caught with its dirty hands in the regional till, skimming off Federal funds meant to fix black spots across the state.
Mr Walsh says a Ministerial brief “has confirmed Jacinta Allan and her gang have skimmed off 8.5 per cent of a Federal Black Spots Funding Program that was meant to improve safety on regional roads”.
He says this is CFMEU 101 on how to “rort the system for financial gain at the cost of the poor old mug taxpayer”.
And all that has been happening at the same time as the government’s own survey last year found 91 per cent of roads were in a “poor” or “very poor” state.
Mr Walsh says Labor set RRV up in 2018 as a major program so, as it claimed in another headline grabbing exercise: “regional Victorians will get the attention they deserve”.
Now he says as the cost of repairing our regional road network has got out of control and beyond the financial reach of a government “hellbent on blowing the budget in ridiculous big build projects going nowhere in Melbourne” Premier Allan and her Cabinet are cutting every cost they can to keep funding their citycentric pipedreams”.
“This latest blow means the deterioration of regional roads will only accelerate,” Mr Walsh says.
“I read this announcement as I was being driven to the Elmore field days and thought I was reading it wrongly as the car was bouncing from pothole to pothole and I kept jumping from line to line,” he says.
“In 2018 the Labor government used RRV as a smokescreen to cover its increasingly glaring incompetence and disdain for regional Victorians, but there is no hiding the truth now.
“Everyone living outside Melbourne knows how bad our road network is, knows how dangerous it is becoming and is now paying the price of new tyres, constant realignments, replacing windscreens as stone and bitumen is flung up from collapsing edges on roads and all while having to slalom down roads to try and avoid the really bad damage.”
Mr Walsh says the RRV website has vanished and its Facebook page has been untouched since last year. In its place, a new ‘Transport Victoria’ website has been launched to promote the government’s road and active transport activities.
He says Jacinta Allan and her CFMEU allies have overseen $41 billion in blowouts on mega-projects in the city but have let our regional road network deteriorate to an appalling state.
“The roads maintenance budget is 16 per cent less than it was in 2020 and the amount of resurfacing works this year will drop by two-thirds, condemning our roads to a worse state in the future,” Mr Walsh adds.
“Now this latest Ministerial brief shows a black spot cash grab by the government under the guise of ‘project and program management and departmental on-costs’,” he adds.
“This was money meant to improve road safety across the state and instead nearly a tenth of it was kept by the Labor Government to cover costs of its bureaucrats.
“Labor can’t manage money and our roads, and the safety of drivers, is being put at risk as a result.”
